events
**These are all donation based events. Your donations will help us defray setup costs and, ultimately, ensure that we’re able to continue offering events and classes to our community. Thank you!**
Courage & Context in The Time of Climate Change
Feb 26, 2019 5:30 PM
Peace Coffee Wonderland Park – Community Room
3262 Minnehaha Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55406
Freaked out about climate change? Tired of feeling guilty about merely being alive on this planet? Wondering how we’re going to get through this and/or what the upcoming shifts might mean for you and/or your retirement and/or kids and/or grandkids?
While there are a lot of unknowns, there are also many things we DO know. Action begets hope, and hope is the thing that many of us are seeking in the face of apocalyptic predictions. SO- take action and join us for coffee and some much-needed climate context as you finalize resolutions and wrap your head around the year ahead of us.
During this extemporaneous offering, Julie Kearns (Founder of environmentally-oriented social enterprise, Junket: Tossed & Found) will bring context to the climate emergency for those shaken awake by recent reports and events. You may expect her to touch on everything from the geopolitical to the personal as dots get connected between our choices and the planet’s limits.
The good news? There are solutions. The challenge? We can no longer expect future solutions: we need to act now.
Julie wants to help you ramp up quickly, and she’ll present a clear overview of where individual community members have unexpected opportunities to do the most good as it relates to making changes that matter. Attendees can expect to leave with a clear sense of urgency and eye-opening perspective about how we fit into the bigger picture of this global crisis- and how we can each take action.
What others have said: “The way you frame your approach to sustainability is so no-nonsense and so hopeful, it is truly unique. Now that I’ve seen you in action, I plan to seek you out again. Consider yourself warned!”
Dreaded Inheritance: The Crowded House
Mar 12, 2019 7:00 PM
Urban Forage Winery and Cider House
3016 East Lake Street
Minneapolis, MN 55406
Are you freaked about the idea of inheriting your parents’ lifetime accumulation of stuff in the not-nearly-distant-enough future?
The emotional labor, investment of time, and direct financial costs involved in emptying a family estate on someone else’s behalf can not be understated. Our work with families dealing with these sorts of circumstances has made us intensely aware of the guilt, exhaustion, frustration, and conflict that often arise when tackling the pig in the python: a filled house, frequently offered up as ‘your inheritance.’
Our objective is to help second generation family members anticipate, and be aware of a series of issues and stages common with this major life transition. This workshop has a specific environmental angle: we’ve seen too many families default to filling a rolloff (or four) only to deal with the emotional aftermath of intensified regret: the throwing away of truckloads of useful things that belonged to important people is something we want to help you avoid.
This will not be a silver bullet, nor will we offer platitudes. Instead, during this ‘tell it to me straight’ info session, we’ll offer a new paradigm for the possession and divestment of material goods, explain the current market for secondhand items, discuss the unique opportunities and challenges that present for those with close connections to aging family members, and provide resources to help you and your sibs empty that house with or without the property’s primary resident involved.
Our friends at Urban Forage will be opening up their doors especially for this session…we figured some of you might want to take the edge off (N/A options also available).
You’ll leave the event with a clear understanding of your options and a list of resources, contacts, and strategies intended to help you and your family keep as much of a lifetime’s treasures out of the waste stream as possible.
Boomer Downsizing Strategies: Do The Most Good
Mar 19, 2019 5:30 PM
Minnehaha Communion Lutheran: Community Healing Hub
4101 37th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55406
**This is a donation based event. Your donations will help us defray setup costs and, ultimately, ensure that we’re able to continue offering events and classes to our community. Thank you!**
As boomers reach retirement, millennials embrace minimalism, and retailers spit out an ever-increasing barrage of product, those getting ready to downsize face a harsh reality: stuff isn’t worth much, demand is weak, and estate liquidators have become strategic about which clients they accept, leaving many seniors – and their families – to deal with decades of emotionally charged accumulation on their own.
Our objective is to help empty nesters know what to expect and how to plan for a major life transition in order to have the most positive experience and most successful outcomes possible.
During this ‘tell it to me straight’ info session, we’ll explain the current market for secondhand goods, discuss the unique opportunities and challenges that present for this particular age group and explain what is likely to happen at each phase of the downsizing process.
You’ll leave the event with a clear understanding of the stages involved, solutions for each stage, and a list of resources, contacts, and strategies intended to help you keep as many of your treasures out of the trash as possible.
If you’d like to host this programming for your community, customer base, or private event, please contact us to learn more and/or schedule.
Mar 26, 2019 5:30 PM
Peace Coffee Wonderland Park – Community Room
3262 Minnehaha Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55406
**This is a donation based event. Your donations will help us defray setup costs and, ultimately, ensure that we’re able to continue offering events and classes to our community. Thank you!**
The intensity of 2018’s weather events shook many of us awake: climate change is real, it’s happening now, it’s caused by humans, it’s hurting people, and we have both an opportunity and the moral imperative to do everything we can to change course.
While political action, recycling, and public transit are ‘shoulds’ that many of us are familiar with, most of us are wholly unclear of what it would take – in practice – to live legitimately sustainable lives based on the key global measure we’re being told must be drastically reduced: the implied complexity of calculating our CO2 emissions makes us desperately want to focus on things that are, well, easier.
During four years of gathering CO2 data at Junket (yeah- that’s what sometimes took us so long at the register), we learned a lot about emissions…mostly, we realized that while it was helpful for *us* to understand how many emissions resulted from manufacturing paper clips, most folks just wanted to feel good about making better choices – but knowing what those choices were? That was the tricky part.
We want to help you make better choices. Perhaps more importantly, we want to help you be confident that the choices you *are* making actually matter.
In this 90 minute session, Junket’s founder, Julie Kearns, will summarize key opportunities for individual and collective carbon draw-down. Small things add up quickly (be they paper clips or habits or votes) when multiplied times millions or billions of people, so we’re going to forego the utility bills and mileage tracking in favor of taking an honest gut-level approach to understanding our footprints — and understanding how we can make them better.
You will leave this session with the personalized results of two completed footprint assessments and the working ability to incorporate climate impact into both daily decision-making and broader life planning efforts.
As we all face the prospect of rapid change (whether we choose it or it is chosen for us), we encourage participants to keep an open mind in considering all adaptive options presented, be they practical habit changes, foreign ideas, or radical shifts in mindset.
Requirement: participant has smart phone or tablet with independent wireless connectivity for completing assessments during the session.
If you’d like to host this programming for your community, customer base, or private event, please contact us to learn more and/or schedule. Skype sessions available for those outside the Twin Cities metro.